Analysis of pervasive mobile ad hoc routing protocols

Pervasive computing (also referred to as ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence) aims to create environments where computers are invisibly and seamlessly integrated and connected into our everyday environment. Pervasive computing and intelligent multimedia technologies are becoming increasingly important, although many potential applications have not yet been fully realized. These key technologies are creating a multimedia revolution that will have significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, and governmental domains. This useful volume provides up-to-date and state-of-the-art coverage of the diverse topics related to pervasive computing and intelligent multimedia technologies. The use of different computational intelligence-based approaches to various problems in pervasive computing are examined, including video streaming, intelligent behavior modeling and control for mobile manipulators, tele-gaming, indexing video summaries for quick video browsing, web service processes, virtual environments, ambient intelligence, and prevention and detection of attacks to ubiquitous databases. Topics and features: -Includes a comprehensive overview, providing a thorough literature review and an outline of the important research challenges -Discusses pervasive computing approaches in the context of intelligent multimedia -Examines virtual reality technology, mobile virtual environments, and the potential use of intelligent multimedia and ubiquitous computing in the hotels of the future -Describes various approaches in ambient intelligence for home health care for the elderly and those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, for volcano monitoring, and for preventing attacks to ubiquitous databases Investigates issues in web services and situation awareness in pervasive computing environments -Explores wireless network applications, such as mobile agents and e-commerce

Previous hop routing: exploiting opportunism in VANETs

Routing in highly dynamic wireless networks such as Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is a challenging task due to frequent topology changes. Sustaining a transmission path between peers in such network environment is difficult. In this thesis, Previous Hop Routing (PHR) is poposed; an opportunistic forwarding protocol exploiting previous hop information and distance to destination to make the forwarding decision on a packet-by-packet basis. It is intended for use in highly dynamic network where the life time of a hop-by-hop path between source and destination nodes is short. Exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication avoids the need to copy packets, and enables redundant paths to be formed. To save network resources, especially under high network loads, PHR employs probabilistic forwarding. The forwarding probability is calculated based on the perceived network load as measured by the arrival rate at the network interface. We evaluate PHR in an urban VANET environment using NS2 (for network traffic) and SUMO (for vehicular movement) simulators, with scenarios configured to re ect real-world conditions. The simulation scenarios are configured to use two velocity profiles i.e. Low and high velocity. The results show that the PHR networks able to achieve best performance as measured by Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Drop Burst Length (DBL) compared to conventional routing protocols in high velocity scenarios

Network Coding in Disruption Tolerant Networks

In recent years, wireless communication technologies have been increasingly deployed in challenging environments where there is no communication infrastructure, as evidenced by the many efforts in building and deploying wireless sensor networks for wildlife tracking [22, 43], underwater sensor networks [38, 41]

INTERMITTENTLY CONNECTED DELAY-TOLERANT WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks (ICDT-WSNs), a branch of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), have features of WSNs and the intermittent connectivity of Opportunistic Networks. The applications of ICDT-WSNs are increasing in recent years; however, the communication protocols suitable for this category of networks often fall short. Most of the existing communication protocols are designed for either WSNs or Opportunistic Networks with sufficient resources and tend to be inadequate for direct use in ICDT-WSNs. In this dissertation, we study ICDT-WSNs from the perspective of the characteristics, chal- lenges and possible solutions. A high-level overview of ICDT-WSNs is given, followed by a study of existing work and our solutions to address the problems of routing, flow control, error control, and storage management. The proposed solutions utilize the utility level of nodes and the connectedness of a network. In addition to the protocols for information transmissions to specific destinations, we also propose efficient mechanisms for information dissemination to arbitrary destinations. The study shows that our proposed solutions can achieve better performance than other state of the art communication protocols without sacrificing energy efficiency

Modeling and Measuring Performance of Data Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks

In this thesis we focus on understanding, measuring and describing the performance of Opportunistic Networks (ONs) and their applications. An “opportunistic network” is a term introduced to describe a sparse, wireless, ad hoc network with highly mobile nodes. The opportunistic networking paradigm deviates from the traditional end-to-end connectivity concept: Forwarding is based on intermittent connectivity between mobile nodes (typically, users with wireless devices); complete routes between sources and destinations rarely exist. Due to this unique property of spontaneous link establishment, the challenges that exist in ONs are specific. The unstructured nature of these networks makes it difficult to give any performance guarantees on data dissemination. For this reason, in Part I of this thesis we explore the dynamics that affect the performance of opportunistic networks. We choose a number of meaningful scenarios where our models and algorithms can be validated using large and credible data sets. We show that a drift and jump model that takes a spatial approach succeeds in capturing the impact of infrastructure and mobile-to-mobile exchanges on an opportunistic content update system. We describe the effects of these dynamics by using the age distribution of a dynamic piece of data (i.e., information updates) as the performance measure. The model also succeeds in capturing a strong bias in user mobility and reveals the existence of regions, whose statistics play a critical role in the performance perceived in the network. We exploit these findings to design an application for greedy infrastructure placement, which relies on the model approximation for a large number of nodes. Another great challenge of opportunistic networking lies in the fact that the bandwidth available on wireless links, coupled with ad hoc networking, failed to rival the capacity of backbones and to establish opportunistic networks as an alternative to infrastructure-based networks. For this reason, we never study ONs in an isolated context. Instead, we consider the applications that leverage interconnection between opportunistic networks and legacy networks and we study the benefits this synergy brings to both. Following this approach, we use a large operator-provided data set to show that opportunistic networks (based on Wi-Fi) are capable of offloading a significant amount of traffic from 3G networks. At the same time, the offloading algorithms we propose reduce the amount of energy consumed by mobiles, while requiring Wi-Fi coverage that is several times smaller than in the case of real-time offloading. Again we confirm and reuse the fact that user mobility is biased towards certain regions of the network. In Part II of this thesis, we treat another issue that is essential for the acceptance and evolution of opportunistic networks and their applications. Namely, we address the absence of experimental results that would support the findings of simulation based studies. Although the techniques such as contact-based simulations should intuitively be able to capture the performance of opportunistic applications, this intuition has little evidence in practice. For this reason, we design and deploy an experiment with real users who use an opportunistic Twitter application, in a way that allows them to maintain communication with legacy networks (i.e., cellular networks, the Internet). The experiment gives us a unique insight into certain performance aspects that are typically hidden or misinterpreted when the usual evaluation techniques (such as simulation) are used. We show that, due to the commonly ignored factors (such as the limited transmission bandwidth), contact-based simulations significantly overestimate delivery ratio and obtain delays that are several times lower than those experimentally acquired. In addition to this, our results unanimously show that the common practice of assuming infinite cache sizes in simulation studies, leads to a misinterpretation of the effects of a backbone on an opportunistic network. Such simulations typically overestimate the performance of the opportunistic component, while underestimating the utility of the backbone. Given the discovered deficiencies of the contact-based simulations, we consider an alternative statistical treatment of contact traces that uses the weighted contact graph. We show that this approach offers a better interpretation of the impact of a backbone on an opportunistic network and results in a closer match when it comes to modeling certain aspects of performance (namely, delivery ratio). Finally, the security requirements for the opportunistic applications that involve an interconnection with legacy networks are also highly specific. They cannot be fully addressed by the solutions proposed in the context of autonomous opportunistic (or ad hoc) networks, nor by the security frameworks used for securing the applications with continuous connectivity. Thus, in Part III of this thesis, we put together a security framework that fits the networks and applications that we target (i.e., the opportunistic networks and applications with occasional Internet connectivity). We then focus on the impact of security print on network performance and design a scheme for the protection of optimal relaying capacity in an opportunistic multihop network. We fine-tune the parameters of our scheme by using a game-theoretic approach and we demonstrate the substantial performance gains provided by the scheme